Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

In fact, he had been abducted by a group of men led by a shadowy figure called Leon, and his body dumped in the Starnberg lake, assisted to the weedbed by a corset of heavy-link chain.

The campaign then turned against the Germans in Egypt already. On November 27 a registered package, mailed in Hamburg and addressed to Professor Wolfgang Pilz. the rocket scientist who had worked for the French, arrived in Cairo. It was opened by his secretary, Miss Hannelore Wenda. In the ensuing explosion the girl was maimed and blinded for life.

On November 28 another package, also mailed in Hamburg, arrived at Factory 333. By this time the Egyptians had set up a security screen for arriving parcels. It was an Egyptian official in the mail room who cut the cord.

Five dead and ten wounded. On November 29 a third package was defused without an explosion.

By February 20, 1963, Harel’s agents had turned their attention once again to Germany. Dr. Heinz Kleinwachter, still undecided whether to go to Cairo or not, was driving back home from his laboratory at Urrach, near the Swiss frontier, when a black Mercedes barred bis route. He threw himself to the floor as a man emptied his automatic through the windshield. Police subsequently discovered the black Mercedes abandoned. It had been stolen earlier in the day. In the glove compartment was an identity card in the name of Colonel Ali Samir. Inquiries revealed this was the name of the chief of the Egyptian Secret Service. Issar Harel’s agents had got their message across, with a touch of black humor for good measure.

By now the reprisal campaign was making headlines in Germany. It became a scandal with the Ben-Gal affair. On March 2, young Heidi Gerke, daughter of Professor Paul Gerke, pioneer of Nasser’s rockets, received a telephone call at her home in Freiburg, Germany. A voice suggested she meet the caller at the Three Kings Hotel in Basel, Switzerland, just over the border.

Heidi informed the German police, who tipped off the Swiss. They planted a bugging device in the room that had been reserved for the meeting. During the meeting, two men in dark glasses warned Heidi G6rke and her young brother to persuade their father to get out of Egypt if he valued his life.

Tailed to Zurich and arrested the same night, the two men went on trial at Basel on June 10, 1963. It was an international scandal.

The chief of the two agents was Yosef Ben-Gal, Israeli citizen.

The trial went well. Professor Yoklek testified as to the warheads of plague and radioactive waste, and the judges were scandalized. Making the best of a bad job, the Israeli government used the trial to expose the Egyptian intent to commit genocide. Shocked, the judges acquitted the two accused.

But back in Israel there was a reckoning. Although the German Chancellor Adenauer had personally promised Ben-Gurion he would try to stop German scientists from taking part in the Helwan rocket-building, Ben-Gurion was humiliated by the scandal. In a rage, he rebuked General Issar Harel for the lengths to which he had gone in his campaign of intimidation. Harel responded with vigor and handed in his resignation. To his surprise, Ben-Gurion accepted it, proving the point that no one in Israel is indispensable, not even the Chief of Intelligence.

That night, June 20, 1963, Issar Harel had a long talk with his close friend, General Meir Amit, then the head of Military Intelligence.

General Amit could remember the conversation clearly, the taut, angry face of the Russian-born fighter, nicknamed Issar the Terrible.

“I have to inform you, my dear Meir, that as from now Israel is no longer in the retribution business. The politicians have taken over. I have tendered my resignation, and it has been accepted. I have asked that you be named my successor, and I believe they will agree.” The ministerial committee that in Israel presides over the activities of the Intelligence networks agreed. At the end of June, General Meir Amit became Chief of Intelligence.

The knell had also sounded, however, for Ben-Gurion. The hawks of his cabinet, headed by Levi Eshkol and his own Foreign Minister, Golda Meir, forced his resignation, and on June 26, 1963, Levi Eshkol was named Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion, shaking his snowy head in anger, went down to his kibbutz in the Negev in disgust. But he remained a member of the Knesset.

Although the new government had ousted David Ben-Gurion, it did not reinstate Isaar Harel. Perhaps it felt that Meir Amit was a general more likely to obey orders than the choleric Harel, who had become a legend in his own lifetime among the Israeli people and relished it.

Nor were Ben-Gurion’s last orders rescinded. General Amit’s instructions remained the same-to avoid any more scandals in Germany over the rocket scientists. With no alternative, he turned the terror campaign against the scientists already inside Egypt.

These Germans lived in the suburb of Meadi, seven miles south of Cairo on the bank of the Nile-a pleasant suburb, except that it was ringed by Egyptian security troops and its German inhabitants were almost prisoners in a gilded cage. To get at them, Meir Amit used his top agent inside Egypt, the riding-school-owner Wolfgang Lutz, who found himself from September 1963 onward forced to take suicidal risks, which sixteen months later would lead to his undoing.

For the German scientists, already shaken badly by the series of bomb parcels sent from Germany, the autumn of 1963 became a nightmare. In the heart of Meadi, ringed by Egyptian security guards, they began to get letters threatening their lives, mailed from Cairo.

Dr. Josef Eisig received one which described his wife, his two children, and the type of work he was engaged in with remarkable precision, then told him to get out of Egypt and go back to Germany. All the other scientists got the same kind of letter. On September 27 a letter blew up in the face of Dr. Kirmayer. For some of the scientists this was the last straw. At the end of September, Dr. Pilz left Cairo for Germany, taking the unfortunate Fraulein Wenda with him.

Others followed, and the furious Egyptians were unable to stop them, for they could not protect them from the threatening letters.

The man in the back of the limousine that bright winter morning in 1963 knew that his own agent, the supposedly pro-Nazi German Lutz, was the writer of the letters and the sender of the explosives.

But he also knew the rocket program was not being halted. The information he had just received proved it. He flicked his eye over the decoded message once again. It confirmed simply that a virulent strain of bubonic bacillus had been isolated in the contagious-diseases laboratory of Cairo Medical Institute, and that the budget of the department involved had been increased tenfold. The information left no doubt that, despite the adverse publicity Egypt had received over the Ben-Gal trial in Basel the previous summer, the government was going ahead with the genocide program.

Had Hoffmann been watching, he would have been forced to give Miller full marks for cheek. After leaving the penthouse office, he took the elevator down to the fifth floor and dropped in to see Max Dom, the magazine’s legal-affairs correspondent.

“I’ve just been up to see Herr Hoffmann,” he said, dropping into a chair in front of Dom’s desk. “Now I need some background. Mind if I pick your brains?”

“Go ahead,” said Dom, assuming Miller had been commissioned to do a story for Komet .

“Who investigates war crimes in Germany?” The question took Dom aback.

“War crimes?”

“Yes. War crimes. Which authorities are responsible for investigating what happened in all the various countries we overran during the war, and finding and prosecuting the individuals guilty of mass murder?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Well, basically it’s the various attorney generals’ offices of the provinces of West Germany.”